Film Studies: Fast cars and pretty flamingos

When word came through that Michael Mann was considering a theatrical movie based on the old hit TV series, Miami Vice, I didn't know whether to be pleased or dismayed. But I wasn't surprised. For some years now – since The Last of the Mohicans – it has been a common opinion that no one is more talented than Mann at the fluent, stirring association of image and sound.

There may be Mann pictures that are a prolonged repetition of genre cliches – Heat is such a case, I think – yet who can take their eyes or ears off the screen when Mann is doing his thing? He makes astonishing movies, by which I mean he fills the screen with style. But does he actually make satisfying movies? Single works that deliver tragedy, or comedy or some cathartic experience? He will be 60 next year, and should be at the top of his profession and art. But he does not work fast. Since The Last of the Mohicans (1992) he has made only three pictures: Heat, The Insider – a serious examination of compromise in American business and the media, but which flopped with the public – and Ali which, for all its skill and Will Smith's committed performance, never added to our sense of its subject from years of television and newsreel. This Michael Mann has never had an unqualified hit, and never won an Oscar. Yet nearly every critic would place him in the top half a dozen American directors in terms of sheer facility.

So what does he do? He thinks of Miami Vice, the TV series that ran from 1984-89, and which broke so much ground. Now 1989 is a long time ago – not even my editor who had suggested this topic knew that Michael Mann had been the creator of the original show, after NBC boss Brandon Tartikoff had woken up one morning possessed by the genius notion – "MTV cops".

It was Mann who turned that concept into reality. He saw all the action there was in Miami in the Eighties: not just the dangerous racial mix as Cuban and Hispanic society grew rich; but the drugs, the music, the amazing new architecture (Miami is now one of the most beautiful American cities), the way the fashion industry had moved in, and the heat that is southern Florida's own. So he devised a cop series that had a seething musical background (the theme came from Jan Hammer), a line of Latina babes, the best new clothes, chic cars, piles of cocaine and Crockett and Tubbs – Don Johnson as a sleazy style icon, and Philip Michael Thomas as his black sidekick.

Mann directed a lot himself, and he laid down a house style of tracking shots, misty colour and shock cuts for the other directors. It was very hip and it picked up a gallery of supporting players that went from Edward James Olmos, Pam Grier and Sheena Easton to Roberto Duran, Don King, Phil Collins and G Gordon Liddy. It was sexy, violent and both cool and hot at the same time. You could hardly grasp the Eighties without being into the show.

Would it work again, even granted the bizarre way in which TV shows often prompt dreadful movies that do well? Miami is still Miami. It's still a flashpoint, and it is the state where the last election was determined. A film might profitably dig into that political jungle, without losing the babes, the threads or the music. It would be easy replacing Johnson and Thomas. And I daresay a movie could explore the increasing likelihood of some rapprochement with Cuba. So it's easy to see why studios might be greedy to send Michael Mann back to Miami. And I don't think he could ever be boring there.

But wouldn't it be Heat re-warmed? Can you go home again? Is an ambitious 60-year-old best advised reworking old tricks and habits? Or is Michael Mann's real need a subject and a writer that could inspire his facility? Once upon a time, he created another TV series, Crime Story (it ran from 1986-88). It began as the cops against the mob in Chicago in the Sixties. But then it moved to Las Vegas and took on the thorough intermingling of crime and politics in America.

Crime Story was a flop – though it had a cult following. It was rushed and often clumsy. That's the territory to go back to, I think, especially now that the US government has confirmed that every bit of radioactive material it can get its pincers on will be buried within Nevada's Yucca Mountain. Why there? Well, it's desert and "safe". But also because Nevada earned it, by decades of divorce, gambling and organised crime. It's a very American equation, and it might make Michael Mann's masterpiece.

d.thomson@independent.co.uk